Laptop battery recalls

August 24, 2006 on 11:29 pm | In Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Damn you Sony!

The battery in my Vaio is dead. Fair enough, it’s 5 years old. But still, I can’t get away with Sony’s more recent poor quality issues.

A couple of months ago my folks were looking for a new laptop. So I bought them a lovely little Dell. Then a couple of weeks ago I hear that Dell are recalling their batteries because they have a dendency to explode. Luckily the folks’ laptop wasn’t affected (the battery batch was out by one digit), but it did dent the confidence in Dell products a little. Sony was the manufacturer of that battery.
Then this morning, Apple decided to recall batteries in its Powerbook G4’s. Of course, mine is affected by that. And to make things sweeter, they insist on you bringing your old battery in, then they send it back and wait for a new one. Could take days, could take weeks. How’s that for crap service? Oh yeah, manufacturer: Sony.

Update:

I ended up taking my laptop into the Apple Center (now Next Byte), who told me that it would take 4-6 weeks to get a replacement unit, and would I mind leaving the battery there until it arrived.  I told them in no uncertain terms that I certainly did mind, and organized for them to call me when the new unit came in so I could swap it over.  What’s the point of announcing a product recall when you don’t have replacements at hand?  Onya Apple!

Remote file editing in Emacs

August 18, 2006 on 12:52 am | In Software | No Comments

After all these years, I still loves me Emacs. I’ve been using it since MicroEmacs on the Amiga back in the 80s. So why is it that I only just today discovered Tramp?

It’s really nifty. Rather than editing a file locally, switching to shell, scp’ing it up to my server of choice, this little plugin lets me directly edit the file on the remote server.

I can simply C-x C-f, and type /admin@server1:/home/admin/myfile.txt, and the file is automatically scp’d down to my machine and opened in a buffer just like a local one. When I C-x C-s it scp’s itself right back up to the server! Not only that, but tab completion works - C-x C-f, /admin@server1:/ [tab] shows you the remote directory structure! I’ve already got my ssh client set up for passwordless authentication so I have no idea if Tramp asks you for a password if required - although I assume it does.

Oh yeah, because it allows Emacs to treat a remote file the same as a local one, it works with other extensions too, such as the built in Ediff (fancy seeing and merging the differences between your local and remote files?)

Piece of piss to install too. I had it up and running on Mac Carbon Emacs in about 10 seconds. It’s funny how the simplest utilities can be such great timesavers!

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